pervocracy:

I know I say this a lot, but: 

If there’s one thing I’d like the public to know about medicine in the US, it’s that it is not standardized.  For the same condition, one doctor will recommend surgery, another will send you to physical therapy, a third one will put you on painkillers, a fourth one will give you steroids, and a fifth one will say “there’s no effective treatment but it will get better on its own.”

Each one of these doctors will say “this is the evidence-based standard of care, I have studies backing me up, and everyone who’s up-to-date with the research does it this way.”  (The studies will be real, too.  There’s just other studies showing other things.)

This isn’t true for every condition, nobody’s going to prescribe PT for strep throat*, but for something like chronic pain or mental health issues it’s especially important to keep in mind.

*I… think.  I’ve worked with some weird doctors.

(via transgenderer)

One hesitates even to speculate about the polyester levels of his outfits.

the-real-numbers:

the-real-numbers:

So I was looking up a certain kind of cellular automata on Wikipedia out of curiosity, and then I ended up seeing a link for something called “billiard ball computers”.

So basically it’s a theoretical construction to show nature has results that can be reversible or something. You do have to let the billiards be frictionless, though. So it’s not like you could implement this in real lif-

Um…

This guy???

Wait,, just look at the pictures they have though. The captions refer to crab groups as “swarm balls”, which is a very endearing term IMO.

Unfortunately, these gates take up a lot of space, so to do big computations you’d need lots of crabs and several hundred feet of cardboard.

Me: You want to google something? Sure, let me fire up my crabputer…

Me: *dumps a bucket of soldier crabs into an acre-wide rat maze*

Me: it takes them a while to find the internet, so sit tight for a bit.

(via shadowpeoplearejerks)

ferdinand lassalle needs to fucking chill

On his way to Berlin from Breslau, [Lassalle] had passed through the Silesian villages where the weavers’ strike was in progress and had listened to their songs of rebellion, and he already regarded himself as a champion of the proletariat. But he aimed also to succeed in society; he was a dandy and drove spirited horses, and he addressed himself to the conquest of women with the same compelling energy and eloquence that he was to display in his political speeches and legal arguments. Of his love letters he might have said as he did about one of his pamphlets, that he was “weaving out of logic and fire a web which will, I think, not fail of its effect.” In his twenties, he was slender, with curly brown hair, a fine intellectual forehead and an incisive aquiline profile.

It was in a manner characteristically resourceful and characteristically unconventional that he found his first opportunity to make himself famous at the same time that he waged his first fight for the victims of an unjust society. There was a lady, the Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt, a princess by birth and of one of the great German families, who had been married at seventeen to a man of a different branch of the same family for the purpose of settling a dispute about entail between this branch of the Hatzfeldts and her father’s. Her husband conceived an implacable antagonism toward her; he took her share of the family money, was unfaithful; tried to deprive her of her children. He sent her daughters to a convent in Vienna; and finally, in 1846, threatened his fourteen-year-old son to disinherit him unless he consented to leave his mother. It was at this point that Lassalle stepped in. The Countess had been attempting to put through a divorce, but the tradition was all against it : German families were run by the males, and her brothers had sabotaged all her efforts . Now Lassalle, though he had been studying philosophy, not law, went to the Countess von Hatzfeldt and induced her to fight for her rights and to put the whole affair in his hands. She had turned out to be a woman of strong character; smoked cigars and is said to have produced a pistol and threatened to shoot an aide-decamp of the King’s who had been sent to get her son for the purpose of putting him away in a military academy. “Convinced,” says Lassalle of the Countess, “that right was on her side, she had confidence in her own strength and in mine. She accepted my proposal with all her heart. Thereupon, I, a young Jew without influence, pitted myself against the most formidable forces-I alone against the world, against the power of rank and of the whole aristocracy, against the power of limitless wealth, against the government and against the whole hierarchy of officials, who are invariably the natural allies of rank and wealth, and against every possible prejudice. I had resolved to combat illusion with truth, rank with right, the power of money with the power of the spirit.” For it was against the subjection of women itself that he was contending in the Countess’s divorce suit : “You seem to overlook the fact,” he once told her, “that your body has been borrowed by an idea of permanent historical importance.”

He worked fast : he made his father give him money, and he bribed the Hatzfeldt peasants to testify against the Count and the press to arouse public opinion against him. The Count seemed about to capitulate and agree to a settlement on the Countess when Lassalle through a willful gesture forfeited all he had won. Lassalle had sent to ask for a personal interview, and the Count had had the servant put out. The young man at once wrote an insolent letter, in which he threatened Hatzfeldt with violence unless he received an apology, and thereby so infuriated the Count that an arrangement became impossible. The contest went on for eight years. Lassalle worked unflaggingly, stopped at nothing. He engineered the theft from the Count’s mistress of a casket which he believed to contain the bond of an annuity settled on the mistress against the interest of the Countess and her children. But the bond was not in the casket, and the friends of Lassalle who had taken it were found out and sent to jail. Lassalle only redoubled his attack: he launched a whole set of lawsuits against the Count, produced three hundred and fifty-eight witnesses, brought charges before thirty-six tribunals, and argued the case in court himself. He even led a demonstration of peasants against the Count on his own estate. Finally, Lassalle himself was arrested for his part in the casket theft and was put in jail in Cologne in February, 1848. 

It was just a few days before the uprising in France. Lassalle pasted up on the wall of his cell a Manifesto to the People by Blanqui, which he had found in a Paris paper; and when he appeared in August for trial, he made a speech that lasted six hours, in which his defense in the matter of the casket was carried over into a general vindication of his “honest and indefatigable efforts to secure recognition for the violated rights of man.” In the meantime, the Countess Hatzfeldt had been appearing at public meetings, denouncing the forces of reaction and declaring that she considered herself a proletarian. The jury did not fail to acquit Lassalle. He emerged a revolutionary hero. At Düsseldorf, the people unhitched the horses from the carriage in which he and the Countess were riding and drew them through the streets. His defense before the tribunals of revolutionary Cologne had made his reputation as an orator, and he now plunged furiously into political activity. He led a delegation from Dusseldorf to a mass meeting on the Rhine called by Engels for the purpose of declaring allegiance to the Frankfort Assembly against Prussia, which resounded through the whole of Germany; and he was arrested and put in jail in November for supporting the appeal signed by Marx which urged the people to refuse to pay taxes and to mobilize against the government. Marx and Engels did their best to get him out; but his case was not allowed to come to trial till May, 1849. In prison he had been harassing the authorities with a continual bombardment of petitions. He bullied the warden so unmercifully that the man finally complained to the governor ; and when the governor visited his cell, Lassalle rebuked him for not saying “Good morning,” refused to let him utter a word of protest and demanded facilities for filing a suit against the prison authorities. When he finally appeared in court, he had already had the speech he had written printed and sold in the town. This speech was an arraignment of the government for violating the reforms it had guaranteed and using the courts to persecute persons who were only trying to enforce those reforms, and of the Frankfort Assembly for not fighting. When he discovered that the public were to be excluded from the courtroom, he refused to deliver this speech, knowing well that the jury had read it, and simply demanded immediate acquittal. The jury brought in a verdict of not guilty; but the authorities, now convinced that he was dangerous, kept him in prison till 1851, and arrested the Countess Hatzfeldt.

(Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station – I almost want to quote the entire chapter because there’s more and it’s all like this)

(…if you’re wondering “did he die in an ill-advised duel,” the answer is yes, yes he did)

journalgen:

Review of Abstract Etymological Aviation

What the heck is VOLTAGE? What the *HECK* is voltage?

“Can you turn the air boy to cool mode?  Because I’m pretty damp right now.”  (Me to Esther just now, about an air conditioner)